CatBus

TV’s Frink said:

Warbler said:

At $330, they better have good sound. The headphones I usually use are less than $20.

At the risk of threadcrapping…this. I don’t get you fancy headphone people.

If it helps: in part, it’s because getting incredible sound from speakers is really effing hard. Speakers are (relatively) expensive, they are large, room acoustics are never ideal without major investment (build a media room!), external noises are hard to block out. So instead of all that, you blow $80 on a set of headphones and have the audio equivalent of a multi-thousand-dollar speaker setup, and you can take them on vacation with you!

So it’s the fancy speaker people I really don’t get. I’ve spent more on a day at the amusement park than I have on headphones, but speakers, sheesh, there’s a money pit with no bottom, because the speakers are just the cheapest component of the whole picture, and in the end you can’t even take it with you.

So apparently Wikileaks has “leaked” a complete copy of Fire and Fury. I’m pretty sure that’s the only book they’ve ever released online. They’re not circumventing censorship, not releasing classified info or trade secrets. It’s as if their only goal was to dampen sales of an already bestselling and widely-available book. Who’d have thought?

At least they probably have learned by now not to release a version that’s been altered by Russian intelligence agents, like they did with Macron’s e-mails.

Typical to my biases, if you’re in the market for something completely unfashionable, cheap, but very good and damn near indestructible, I’d recommend the Sony MDR-V6. It’s truly the same damn thing as the MDR-7506, minus the gold stereo plug. Response is pretty flat (in a good way), detail is great, I use them for all my audio editing.

Oh, and anything can drive them, from some cheap knockoff MP3 player on up. And there’s a good chance the guy who mixed the audio you’re listening to did it using these headphones (well, the 7506).

The SE dialogue changes were already changed in our version… but those changes may not have been so great either.

But that is how it ends up working, intended or not. The media spending so much time critiquing tweets means less time critiquing policies. And the critiques of the tweets can be very easily dismissed as fluff. Leaving very little observable media criticism of Trump for those who dismiss that stuff out of hand.

It’s also how it worked during the campaign. Nobody knew a single one of his policies, and 46% of the country thought that was a wonderful thing.

You didn’t mention you can finally say “Merry Christmas” again 😉

Or is it that you can finally dream of a White Christmas?

darth_ender said:

CatBus said:

darth_ender said:

or there is CNN and MSNBC

I hear this from a lot of conservatives. Do you really think there’s an anti-Trump bias here, or is this just a counterpoint to the left of FOX? All the standard leftist media boogeymen (CNN, MSNBC, NPR, NYT) seem pretty pro-Trump to me so far, just pro-Trump by omission rather than pro-Trump by commission like FOX. That’s the view from the left at least.

Just a quick look at CNN.com has several headlines that are embarrassing for Trump. Usually, I see far more. It’s often a mixture of news and opinion articles that are disparaging towards him. I’ll be honest, a part of me enjoys it and fills me with a proud “I told ya so” attitude towards the Republican Party of which I am a former member. On the other hand, I can’t help but feel like it’s excessive to the point that I find some of it hard to believe–like such extreme saturation of negative Trump news that it’s hard to know what’s really true and what is actually just people trying desperately to bring him down.

For the record, I still hope he does get brought down. I feel he is tremendously dangerous to our country and the world.

I dunno. The “news” (such as it is) today involves people having Twitter feuds and publishing tell-all books. As that goes, the CNN front page I’m looking at seems to cover those bases pretty neutrally, albeit with the salacious tabloid fever that flavors all news these days.

Now, I’m with you that the facts are anti-Trump. So if you report the facts objectively, you’re going to sound anti-Trump. But you’d have to pretty much ignore his tweets and random blatherings and focus on policies, and I’m afraid no media outlet’s going to do that in the clickbait economy.

I guess we may also be measuring bias differently too. If you’re upset the media hops over the latest Twitter gaffe at the expense of everything else, I’m with you. And Trump’s manner of Twitter usage pretty much ensures that that salacious gossip column style coverage is going to be anti-Trump because you’d have to be a crazy person (or FOX contributor) to support his tweets.

But as far as the real substantial news goes, I see CNN doing a lot of “our staff stenographer just wrote down what they said at the press conference without analysis”, which is pretty pro-Trump (also lazy). Or consulting “experts on both sides” which allows people to offer exercises in framing the issues rather than analysis of the issues (also lazy). And as the facts are anti-Trump, dropping any number of substantial stories skews the coverage in his favor.

So is media shallow? Hell yes. Lazy? Vapid? No argument. Liberal? Not so much.

Mrebo said:

I like that the responses focused solely on his examples of media.

Well, there’s not much to argue with in the basic premise. Objectivity doesn’t sell. Centrism isn’t the same thing as objectivity, but I feel like the Washington Post has been doing pretty well walking the line there (for now). Objectivity? Nope, haven’t seen in in very big quantities anywhere.

darth_ender said:

or there is CNN and MSNBC

I hear this from a lot of conservatives. Do you really think there’s an anti-Trump bias here, or is this just a counterpoint to the left of FOX? All the standard leftist media boogeymen (CNN, MSNBC, NPR, NYT) seem pretty pro-Trump to me so far, just pro-Trump by omission rather than pro-Trump by commission like FOX. That’s the view from the left at least.

Mrebo said:

So historical! Monument honoring black Confederate soldiers

Probably based on that photographic misattribution the Confederate apologists are still trotting out, as if historians haven’t already thoroughly documented its true origins. Oh well. The rewriting of history continues.

chyron8472 said:

CatBus said:

suspiciouscoffee said:

CatBus said:

TV’s Frink said:

CatBus said:

suspiciouscoffee said:

TV’s Frink said:

joefavs said:

CatBus said:

joefavs said:

Bond films are under “J” for James Bond

I twitched, I’ll admit it.

I’m not happy with it either, but I can’t find an alternative I like. Putting them at the beginning for “007” feels aesthetically off and “B” for Bond isn’t really any different than J.

That doesn’t make sense to me. If someone comes up to me and says they love James movies, I have no idea what they’re talking about.

So if you have Forrest Gump, you put it at ‘G’ for Gump, Forrest?

If the name of the film was James Bond, I’d file it under “J” too (if I filed alphabetically). Similarly, if they were all “James Bond and the…” a la Harry Potter. But it’s the name of a central character in a series of films that don’t have that character’s name in the film titles, so it’s lastname, firstname. Forrest Gump goes under “F”.

This goes back to my record store days. Jethro Tull and Bob Dylan are both fictional names. But Jethro Tull goes under “J” and Bob Dylan goes under “D” because Bob Dylan is a pseudonym for a particular person, whereas Jethro Tull is a name for the entire band.

You’re overthinking it. Like, a lot.

Sorry, I was paid for doing this some time ago. Not, you know, a lot… but paid nonetheless. The OCD sticks.

We were open til midnight. Some guy came in and spent a lot of time by our cassettes. We didn’t take much notice because cassettes were this weird pre-CD holdover without the hipster cred of the vinyl, off in a corner. By the time we went to check on him, we discovered that he had reorganized our cassette section by the color of the spine.

Oh yeah, and Courtney Love came in one time. That was awkward.

If I had enough movies and time, I’d rearrange my collection to make a gradient, take a picture, and then put it all back.

It was very pretty, and well-executed.

We had strong reason to believe drugs were involved, needless to say.

So how long did it take to put it all back?

It was a pretty small section. Maybe an hour or two, including the time spent just standing back and laughing about it.

PM sent. Please let me know if you see any problems with the Icelandic subtitles. They’re based on OCR’s of the official Blu-ray subtitles, but OCR can introduce errors, and the original translations may have had trouble too.

Apologies for the link to the poster child for crap website design gone haywire:

http://www.liberalamerica.org/2018/01/03/chrissy-teigen-john-legend-push-back-trumpkin-slander/

For those afraid to follow the link, those Pizzagate peddlers are still out there and still telling people there are liberal pedophiles running amok in pizza parlors (or whatever the hell, do the specifics even matter?). Probably right after complaining about how Roy Moore was robbed by vote-stealing liberals, but I digress. We’ve even had links to some of these nutjobs in this thread, though thankfully not for a long time.

Anyway, the problem with stopping slander like this in America is that lawsuits are expensive, slow, and unlikely to yield any sort of consequential damages. But if you piss off the right people, they will throw all that aside and sue your ass anyway just to watch you burn. Hooray for Chrissy and John. Sometimes the spite move is the right move.

My findings on what makes a good subtitling font, posted mostly so that Google’s search results have a chance of turning up something more useful on the subject:

1. A font with consistent stroke thickness and no small serifs. This usually points to a sans serif font, but there are some humanist sans serif fonts with modulated strokes that should be avoided, as well as slab serifs that could be considered. The reasons for this are that small details tend to disappear against a busy, moving background, and that by far the most common and space-efficient form of contrast for subtitles is the black outline, which tends to appear unattractively globbed up around thinner elements.
2. A font with open apertures, like some of those humanist fonts linked above. Big openings on the lowercase E and A are easier to see. This also plays into Arabic and other scripts.
3. A generic, unassuming font. Not necessarily something in the Helvetica family, but certainly something leaning in that direction, like Myriad. The point is to watch the film, not to admire or even excessively notice your text. This rules out a lot of your classic slab serifs, which are about as subtle as a drunk guy yelling in an alley, but modern slab serifs can be quite usable.
4. A font where letters that can be similar-looking are easy to distinguish. Capital “I” and lowercase “L” (which usually involves adornments in violation of Rule 1, but oh well), and even a lowercase “A” that doesn’t look like a lowercase “O”.
5. A weight somewhere between medium and bold, and no more condensed than semicondensed.

Other considerations are:

1. Contrast method. I prefer the common black outline with drop shadow. I’ve seen people use just the outline or just a shadow and that can work well too. No contrast at all is a bold and probably bad choice, or more likely the result of simply not knowing any better. A semitransparent block-style background dramatically improves readability, but at the expense of annoyingly obscuring the underlying image. As such, I have reserved its use exclusively for SDH subtitles, but I’ve seen it recommended for CJK subtitles as well.
2. Subtitle color. My opinion is that, unless you’re doing per-speaker color cues, subtitles should always be white. While yellow could very well provide more contrast, it falls far afoul of the “generic, unassuming” rule IMO. There are other ways to provide adequate contrast. However, pure 0xFFFFFF white against pure black is so much contrast that it can be hard to read. Consider a very bright gray that’s more-or-less indistinguishable from white – I find it easier on the eyes in dark scenes.

So anyway, that’s my brain dump, with for me the additional requirement that the font needs to be consistent between scripts in many, many languages, and that landed me on Noto Sans. Also, I’m the guy who kept using Arial for something like five years, so don’t take my word as gospel for any of this. There are lots of things I still don’t know about design and typefaces – I just feel a little less ignorant than I was a few months ago and wanted to share my findings.

Were there compromises? Absolutely. Noto’s capital “J” drops low, which is a little idiosyncratic for my taste. The italic forms of both the lowercase “A” and lowercase “F” seem less than ideal, but might grow on me. I had to go with a calligraphic style for Arabic and Thai, just because those languages traditionally don’t use sans serif for subtitles. And I had to devise a fairly complicated font fallback logic so that we wouldn’t see these lovely inconsistencies in Noto*. But, by and large, after some time and effort, it works really well. Certainly better than what we’re currently using IMO.

* I should add that Google is very much aware of these inconsistencies and provides guidelines for how to use Noto on their website which effectively resolves the issue. The problem is that these guidelines are geared toward CSS/web solutions, and I needed to script the fallback logic for Pango markup.

suspiciouscoffee said:

CatBus said:

TV’s Frink said:

CatBus said:

suspiciouscoffee said:

TV’s Frink said:

joefavs said:

CatBus said:

joefavs said:

Bond films are under “J” for James Bond

I twitched, I’ll admit it.

I’m not happy with it either, but I can’t find an alternative I like. Putting them at the beginning for “007” feels aesthetically off and “B” for Bond isn’t really any different than J.

That doesn’t make sense to me. If someone comes up to me and says they love James movies, I have no idea what they’re talking about.

So if you have Forrest Gump, you put it at ‘G’ for Gump, Forrest?

If the name of the film was James Bond, I’d file it under “J” too (if I filed alphabetically). Similarly, if they were all “James Bond and the…” a la Harry Potter. But it’s the name of a central character in a series of films that don’t have that character’s name in the film titles, so it’s lastname, firstname. Forrest Gump goes under “F”.

This goes back to my record store days. Jethro Tull and Bob Dylan are both fictional names. But Jethro Tull goes under “J” and Bob Dylan goes under “D” because Bob Dylan is a pseudonym for a particular person, whereas Jethro Tull is a name for the entire band.

You’re overthinking it. Like, a lot.

Sorry, I was paid for doing this some time ago. Not, you know, a lot… but paid nonetheless. The OCD sticks.

We were open til midnight. Some guy came in and spent a lot of time by our cassettes. We didn’t take much notice because cassettes were this weird pre-CD holdover without the hipster cred of the vinyl, off in a corner. By the time we went to check on him, we discovered that he had reorganized our cassette section by the color of the spine.

Oh yeah, and Courtney Love came in one time. That was awkward.

If I had enough movies and time, I’d rearrange my collection to make a gradient, take a picture, and then put it all back.

It was very pretty, and well-executed.

We had strong reason to believe drugs were involved, needless to say.

TV’s Frink said:

CatBus said:

suspiciouscoffee said:

TV’s Frink said:

joefavs said:

CatBus said:

joefavs said:

Bond films are under “J” for James Bond

I twitched, I’ll admit it.

I’m not happy with it either, but I can’t find an alternative I like. Putting them at the beginning for “007” feels aesthetically off and “B” for Bond isn’t really any different than J.

That doesn’t make sense to me. If someone comes up to me and says they love James movies, I have no idea what they’re talking about.

So if you have Forrest Gump, you put it at ‘G’ for Gump, Forrest?

If the name of the film was James Bond, I’d file it under “J” too (if I filed alphabetically). Similarly, if they were all “James Bond and the…” a la Harry Potter. But it’s the name of a central character in a series of films that don’t have that character’s name in the film titles, so it’s lastname, firstname. Forrest Gump goes under “F”.

This goes back to my record store days. Jethro Tull and Bob Dylan are both fictional names. But Jethro Tull goes under “J” and Bob Dylan goes under “D” because Bob Dylan is a pseudonym for a particular person, whereas Jethro Tull is a name for the entire band.

You’re overthinking it. Like, a lot.

Sorry, I was paid for doing this some time ago. Not, you know, a lot… but paid nonetheless. The OCD sticks.

We were open til midnight. Some guy came in and spent a lot of time by our cassettes. We didn’t take much notice because cassettes were this weird pre-CD holdover without the hipster cred of the vinyl, off in a corner. By the time we went to check on him, we discovered that he had reorganized our cassette section by the color of the spine.

Oh yeah, and Courtney Love came in one time. That was awkward.

I think the more important question here is… who here files The Beatles under T? Because that’s about twelve bridges and a pedestrian overpass too far.

ray_afraid said:

CatBus said:

Bob Dylan goes under “D”

No.

Your only other choice is “Z”.

suspiciouscoffee said:

TV’s Frink said:

joefavs said:

CatBus said:

joefavs said:

Bond films are under “J” for James Bond

I twitched, I’ll admit it.

I’m not happy with it either, but I can’t find an alternative I like. Putting them at the beginning for “007” feels aesthetically off and “B” for Bond isn’t really any different than J.

That doesn’t make sense to me. If someone comes up to me and says they love James movies, I have no idea what they’re talking about.

So if you have Forrest Gump, you put it at ‘G’ for Gump, Forrest?

If the name of the film was James Bond, I’d file it under “J” too (if I filed alphabetically). Similarly, if they were all “James Bond and the…” a la Harry Potter. But it’s the name of a central character in a series of films that don’t have that character’s name in the film titles, so it’s lastname, firstname. Forrest Gump goes under “F”.

This goes back to my record store days. Jethro Tull and Bob Dylan are both fictional names. But Jethro Tull goes under “J” and Bob Dylan goes under “D” because Bob Dylan is a pseudonym for a particular person, whereas Jethro Tull is a name for the entire band.

joefavs said:

CatBus said:

joefavs said:

Bond films are under “J” for James Bond

I twitched, I’ll admit it.

I’m not happy with it either, but I can’t find an alternative I like. Putting them at the beginning for “007” feels aesthetically off and “B” for Bond isn’t really any different than J.

“F” for Fleming, or use Broccoli as another reason for “B”.

joefavs said:

Bond films are under “J” for James Bond

Come on, man, trigger warning please.

s/wouldn’t/couldn’t/

Neglify said:

I sort mine autobiographically.

No fucking way.

In most cases, organized by director/creator. Within that director’s section, organized chronologically. TV series are mixed in (chronologically by the start of the series). Blu-rays and DVDs are mixed together. Criterion is mixed in.

That said, there are some movies that get lumped together even though they have different directors. The Star Wars trilogy goes together under “L”. The Studio Ghibli films go together under “M”. Sequels are put together even if there are unrelated one-offs in between, so the whole Star Wars trilogy goes first, then the Holiday Special is after.

It’s a really logical system… for me. The downside is that the rest of the family never knows where to put the movies back – “Dad, I’m trying to put back The Empire Strikes Back but I can’t find the ‘T’ section!” Which is fine because I’d rather do it anyway.

Good news: Trump ends the voter fraud panel.

Bad news: He’s reassigned the “issue” of voter fraud to DHS, which is equally capable of pursuing a voter suppression agenda.